The auto-resume restart-loop breaker (#30719, defense-3) pruned its boot
log against an absolute `window_seconds` (default 60s). That prune is
period-sensitive: a crash cycle slower than the window drops its own
history on every boot, so the counter never leaves 1 and the breaker can
never trip, no matter how long the loop runs.
The cycle reported in #81642 is ~150s — a wedged event loop, the liveness
watchdog hard-exiting at ~90s, a supervisor respawn, and auto-resume
replaying the same session that wedges it again. Structurally invisible to
a 60s window: `gateway/restart_loop.json` kept a single timestamp across 15
kills in one morning. Because every cycle leaves a gateway that cannot
process SIGTERM, `hermes update` has no drainable gateway to stop, which is
the reported hang.
Chain boots on the inter-boot GAP instead of an absolute window: two boots
belong to the same loop when they are no more than `max_gap_seconds` apart
(default 300s, floored by `window_seconds` so widening the window never
makes the breaker less sensitive). The verdict becomes period-agnostic —
the original ~10s respawn loop still trips in 3 boots, and so does a 150s
one — while a boot after real quiet resets the chain, so occasional
operator restarts still never accumulate. The persisted chain is capped at
50 entries.
- gateway/restart_loop_guard.py: gap-chained pruning (`_chain_ending_at`),
`DEFAULT_MAX_GAP_SECONDS`, `max_gap_seconds` kwarg on the three entry
points, clock-step tolerance, bounded state file
- gateway/run.py: `_restart_loop_guard_config` reads and returns
`max_gap_seconds`; the auto-resume call site passes it through
- hermes_cli/config_defaults.py: `gateway.restart_loop_guard.max_gap_seconds`
Tests: 7 new cases in TestRestartLoopGuard covering the slow cycle, chain
persistence, quiet-period reset, the #30719 fast loop, the config knob, the
window floor, and the disabled breaker. Verified RED before the fix (the
slow-cycle case asserted `[1300.0] == [1000.0, 1150.0, 1300.0]`, exactly
the single-timestamp state file from the report) and GREEN after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Completes the #30719 restart-loop defenses. Defenses 1-2 (the
_HERMES_GATEWAY guard on `hermes gateway stop|restart` + terminal_tool,
and the cron-creation lifecycle filter) already landed on main, but two
gaps remained:
- The agent's `cronjob` model tool calls cron.jobs.create_job directly,
bypassing the hermes_cli.cron.cron_create CLI filter, so lifecycle
commands scheduled via the model tool were only blocked at execution
time (terminal_tool), not at creation. Moved the filter to a shared
cron/lifecycle_guard.py enforced at create_job — the single chokepoint
every job-creation path hits (CLI + model tool). Re-exported
_contains_gateway_lifecycle_command from hermes_cli.cron so
terminal_tool's import keeps working.
- No breaker for the auto-resume loop itself. Defenses 1-2 cover the
cron/CLI/terminal paths, but any other SIGTERM source (e.g. a raw
terminal("launchctl kickstart ai.hermes.gateway")) still triggers the
boot->auto-resume->re-run cycle. Added gateway/restart_loop_guard.py:
counts restart-interrupted boots in a rolling window (config
gateway.restart_loop_guard, default 3 boots / 60s) and skips
auto-resume for that boot once tripped. The gateway still comes up and
serves real inbound messages; it just stops replaying the session that
keeps killing it, putting a human back in the loop.
Also tightened the lifecycle regex over main's version: dropped
`hermes gateway start` (benign), required the gateway identifier on the
launchctl/systemctl branches (so `launchctl unload
ai.hermes.update-checker.plist` and `systemctl restart
hermes-meta.service` no longer false-positive), added the inverse
pkill token order, and fixed the binary-script bypass (decode with
errors='replace' instead of swallowing UnicodeDecodeError). The
create_job guard resolves relative script paths under HERMES_HOME/scripts
the same way the scheduler does, so a bare script name is scanned as the
file that actually runs.
Design and much of defense-2 originate from PR #33395 (@kshitijk4poor),
which itself salvaged #30728 (@SimoKiihamaki). Rebuilt against current
main since defenses 1-2 had already landed under different names.
Closes#30719.
Co-authored-by: SimoKiihamaki <simo.kiihamaki@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: kshitijk4poor <82637225+kshitijk4poor@users.noreply.github.com>
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